


campanula

by fullmetalruby



Series: febslash fembruary [12]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Femslash February 2021, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, YES i tagged regulus YES i managed to squeeze him in what of it, but not for fleur/tonks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-14 14:29:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29420145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fullmetalruby/pseuds/fullmetalruby
Summary: Campanula (bellflower)-- representative of gratitude, humility, attractiveness, and everlasting love.[Femslash February 2021 | Day 12 | Soulmate Tattoos]
Relationships: Fleur Delacour/Nymphadora Tonks
Series: febslash fembruary [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2139714
Comments: 2
Kudos: 19





	campanula

**Author's Note:**

> yeah so this is late but im tired and its midterms soooooo
> 
> for once in my life the title isnt a quote from something! good job me

Her earliest distinct memory is of her uncle.

She was three or four years old, and her father had put her to bed hours ago, but she’d heard the front door open and then her uncle’s soft voice, so she  _ had _ to get up and see him. He knelt down for her when she entered the room, not strong enough to lift her, and for once didn’t fall back when she crashed into him.

“You’ve gotten so big!” he’d exclaimed. “And your hair!”

Ignoring her bright red hair, Nymphadora had proudly pointed at her nose, instead. “Freckles, too!”

He’d appropriately marvelled at the freckles she’d learned how to will into existence, then smirked and made freckles erupt all over his face. Nymphadora gasped as he made them dance across his skin, forming flowers and clouds and constellations on his cheeks. She watched streams of color disappear under his collar and reemerge from his sleeves.

“You’ve got a long way to go, little Nym.” He’d poked her nose. “But you’ll get there!”

Her eyes were still fixed on his left arm, where the freckle swarm had circled around what she would later come to know as the Dark Mark. “You changed that!”

His eyes had darted down to it as well and he’d yanked his sleeve down to cover it. The humor on his face had drained away in an instant. Though the memory wasn’t there of what it used to be, she knew that her uncle’s soulmark used to be something else. And even then she knew that the best Metamorphmagus in the world couldn’t change their soulmark.

“Have you tried to change yours?” her uncle had asked her then, lightly incredulous.

“Yeah, it’s boring!” Then she’d held her arm out for his inspection. Her own soulmark was only a smear of color at the time, not yet developed into anything solid. Her mother’s soulmark was of an old key, wrapped in flowers and vines. Her father’s was of a house with a closed door, covered in the same vines and flowers. 

His thin, cold fingers had traced over that smear of color, almost reverently. Closer, she could see that there were still dark red lines underneath his Dark Mark.

“It’s lovely,” he corrected. “Don’t ever change it. Don’t ever try. Promise me that?”

It had sounded like a goodbye. Like a last request. As a child, she hadn’t noticed that, but she noticed how sad he was when he said it.

“I promise, uncle.”

After hugging her close and pressing a kiss to her forehead, he sent her back off to bed, saying that he had to talk to her mother about adult things she would find boring. She’d almost protested-- she could sit through boring adult things if it meant getting to be with her uncle, who only stopped by once in a blue moon-- but instead she let herself be ushered off.

She never saw her uncle Regulus again. 

But his words stuck with her, especially later once she understood what had happened with him. The Dark Lord covered up his followers’ soulmarks with the Dark Mark, symbolically making them all his own soulmates. Uncle Regulus had regretted it, and that visit at the Tonks home had been the last time anyone saw him alive.

She, like everyone else her age, imagined who would be at the other end of her soulmark. She knew it didn’t have to be romantic, or even platonic. All a soulmark leads to is the person who will leave the single biggest impact on your life. For a while, the flowers had made her think her parents could be her soulmates, but the flowers on her mark weren’t even remotely the same kind of flowers as on her parents’. Then, she’d wondered if her soulmate would have been her uncle Regulus, whose loss still hurt all this time later even though she’d been so little, but maybe that’s just because of how strongly she associates him with soulmarks in general. Besides, her mother assured her that uncle Regulus’ soulmate wasn’t anything remotely like hers.

But for all the tattoos she got, all the ways she learned to reconfigure her body, she never once tried to cover or change her soulmark again. As she got older it solidified into a sword, wreathed in purple, bell-like flowers, and she often found herself changing her hair or her eyes to match the color.

Charlie Weasley knows all this.

“Please?”

“I’m not pretending to be your soulmate,” she reiterates. “Why can’t I come as just a friend?”

Charlie groans. “Bill and Percy are both bringing  _ datemates  _ which means I need to as well or Mum is going to be looking at me judgmentally all night, and I can’t sit through that again. Please. Mum’s birthday was bad enough. You’d think that Bill’s girlfriend was the best present all night.”

“Since when was Bill dating?” Nymphadora isn’t normally up-to-date on whether Charlie’s family members are dating, but she spends a lot of time with him and he’s closest to Bill out of all his family.

“Oh, he’s not, but he got a friend from work to pretend for him. She’s all… pretty and polite. Mum even overlooked that she’s French. Remember that girl from the Triwizard Tourney?”

She fixes him with the best  _ are you stupid _ look she can muster, whcih he brushed off after so much exposure to it.  _ “Yes _ , I remember her. You made fun of me.”

“Yes, Miss Cradle Robber, I did. She’s Bill’s fake girlfriend, which gave me the idea.”

“So I don’t need to be a soulmate, I can just be your girlfriend. We’ve pulled that one before, remember how we had a fake messy breakup so you could look better for that dragon handling job? So you could show your commitment to the profession?”

Charlie puts a hand on her shoulder, his eyes full of false pity. “I forget. You don’t have any siblings. I not only need to meet the same standards as my siblings, but I need to  _ one-up _ . I need to win.”

Nymphadora brushes his hand off her shoulder. “Girlfriend. Final offer. And I  _ will _ be flirting with the French girl.”

“Deal.”

She’d wanted Charlie to be her soulmate, once. When they were younger and he was her only friend in the world. But Charlie is one of the few in the populus without a soulmark, and one of the even smaller number of people that’s okay with being markless. His paint-smear had never developed into anything further. His plan had, apparently, been to cover it with makeup and then draw over it, convince his parents that his soulmark had awakened overnight, and that he realized Nymphadora was his soulmate. Late bloomers are rare, but they’ve been known to happen.

So Nymphadora and Charlie spend Christmas Eve with her parents, partly working out their story with her parents as sounding boards, eventually settling on the age-old ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’. While Charlie was away in Romania they’d noticed how much of a hole the other left in their absence, and so when he returned for a while they’d finally confessed their love for each other.

Waking up on Christmas morning, they exchanged presents with her parents, ate breakfast, and departed for the Burrow. 

They’re the last to arrive, piled high with trinkets for his various family members. Tonks has only peripheral knowledge of most of them-- Fred and George are troublemakers of the most intense kind, Ron and Percy are fun to piss off, and Ginny is the favorite so Charlie never really messed with her without getting in trouble. Mr. Weasley is easy to please, and Mrs. Weasley is not to be crossed under any circumstances. 

“Charlie!” Mrs. Weasley greets them at the door. “And--”

“Mum, happy Christmas.” Charlie rushes inside the house-- it’s  _ cold _ on the stoop, and the longer the door is open the more heat gets out. “You know Nymphadora already.”

She removes a glove and shakes Mrs. Weasley’s hand when she enters the house. “Wotcher, ma’am! Happy Christmas!”

Mrs. Weasley follows them into the living room, where the rest of the family is gathering. It looks like the actual residents of the house might still be getting dressed upstairs, but Nymphadora knows them all enough from photos to recognize Mr. Weasley, Bill, and Percy on sight. She figures that the brunette sitting on the arm of Percy’s chair, with an arm around Percy, is probably Percy’s boyfriend. And of course, she knows Fleur Delacour.

“Are you two--?” Mrs. Weasley asks as she comes into the room behind them.

Charlie nods, exchanging what they hope is a shy, young-and-in-love glance. “We’re trying some stuff out, yeah.”

The smile Nymphadora puts on isn’t fake, but it sure isn’t a besotted one like she should probably be wearing. Instead, she’s just pushing down laughter over how giddy Charlie’s mum gets once she hears.

“What, finally following my lead, Charlie?” Bill asks. His smile is easy and charming, and makes Nymphadora want to just sit down and have a long chat about life goals with him.

Charlie nods. Bill’s smile gets a bit brighter. “Come on over, tell us how you’ve been. Haven’t heard from you in a while.”

From there, Nymphadora is introduced properly to Percy and his boyfriend Oliver, who’s a reserve player for a professional Quidditch team. Charlie is much more interested in that than she is, and immediately launches into a discussion with Oliver about brooms or something. Nymphadora has never cared much for Quidditch, and can’t really follow the conversation.

“This is Fleur, my girlfriend.” Bill gestures to her. Fleur’s long blonde hair is twisted up into an elaborately braided knot low on her head, leaving a few curls to frame her pretty face. She has on a powder-blue shawl and a long grey skirt, which of course only draws the eye down her legs. 

Looking at her, and at the rest of the festively-dressed family starting to make their way down the stairs, Nymphadora feels rather out of place in her battered leather jacket and sensible short-sleeved blouse underneath. Sure, it had been the goal to look like an incompetend girlfriend so that when she and Charlie “break up” it looks better, but all the same she has to repress the urge to glamour herself into something else.

“Nymphadora Tonks. Pleasure to meet you.” She shakes Fleur’s hand.

Fleur is looking over her with a kind of gaze she didn’t expect-- it’s divorced, examining. Not quite cold, but something close. “The pleasure is mine,” Fleur eventually responds. She leans back in her seat. “What if your work, Miss Tonks?”

“Just Tonks is fine. I’m an Auror. I catch criminals,” she clarifies when Fleur doesn’t seem to catch the meaning. “I was on security at the Triwizard Tournament. You were brilliant.”

From there, conversation flows easily and there’s a lot of it. Nymphadora largely concerns herself with pulling off a convincing con (and she’s good enough at lying. Metamorphmagi do the best undercover work, after all). So many Weasleys, so many questions, and as the newest proto-addition to the clan, she’s the most sought-after conversationalist at the party. She tries to escape to the peace and quiet of the kitchen under the guise of finding water to drink, but instead she happens upon Mrs. Weasley and Fleur in the middle of prepping dinner and gossiping. 

Mrs. Weasley is dropping cut potatoes into a pot of water, but Fleur is doing the dishes, her sleeves rucked up to her elbows and showing off her soulmark. Bill Weasley’s mark is a compass without a needle and with no north-- Fleur’s is a compass needle pointing at a star. It’s a beautiful, poetic mark, and Nymphadora can’t help but admire it before diving back into the conversation hub in the living room-- she can take endless discussions of Quidditch and dragon care and chess, but she’s pitiful at following gossip.

Still, though she’s used to talking, after a few hours of non-stop talking even Nymphadora’s normally-boundless energy motor was starting to run out of steam. So, like the brave Auror she is, she absconds to the back patio.

She closes the back door behind her and marvels at the outdoors. The winter air is lovely against her overwarm cheeks-- the combination of twelve people in an enclosed place, plus an active fire and a lively kitchen? It’s a good thing Nymphadora’s brains didn’t melt out her ears. All the same, she’s pulled her leather jacket back around her shoulders. Just because she likes the cold now doesn’t mean she will in five minutes.

There, leaning against a support pillar, is Fleur, having already beat her out here. It seems that not even Fleur Delacour’s people skills can hold against the entire Weasley family at once.

“They’re a bit much, yeah?”

Fleur jumps, one dainty hand flying to her throat as if clutching a necklace of nonexistent pearls. When she sees who’s snuck up behind her, she relaxes. “Oh. Just you.” She swallows. “Yes. A bit much, as you say. There were not so many at Madame Weasley’s birthday.”

“Yeah, I guess the younger ones were at school. Must have been nice.”

“I can ‘andle a few. I ‘ave a younger sister at home, and a few cousins.”

Nymphadora leans against the opposite support pillar. “Lucky. I’m an only child, and my mum’s sisters don’t associate with us anymore, so I’ve never met my cousin. Heard he’s a ponce, though, so no big loss, right?”

“I suppose so.” Fleur shivers. Reminded suddenly that Fleur is wearing just a thin blouse and shawl, Nymphadora sheds her jacket and offers it.

“Here. You look a bit cold.”

Fleur eyes the jacket. Her high cheekbones are flushed from the cold. “I couldn’t. You would be cold, then, as well.”

“I grew up even further north, I can handle it.” She shakes the coat again. “Take it.”

So, Fleur slides the coat over her shoulders, and draws it around her torso without putting her arms in the sleeves. The jacket is big enough on Nymphadora, being one of her dad’s old things that she filched in the hopes of looking cooler than she actually is, and even though Fleur is the same size as her she wears it differently. The way she holds herself makes her look smaller.

After a few moments of looking at each other, Nymphadora speaks up. “So… how did you and Bill meet? I know about your whole. Situation. Me ‘n Charlie have something similar.”

“We met at work, and ‘e offered to ‘elp me learn English. It is not like French. Your... “

“Verb agreements! I know,” Nymphadora exclaims. “I don’t know French, but my mum’s family all speaks German, so I learned that. And the agreements were  _ hell _ .”

Fleur nods. “Nouns, too. Where is the gender?”

Nymphadora scratches the back of her neck. “Yeah, English is a pretty silly language.”

But when she looks back up at Fleur, the other woman isn’t looking at her face-- instead, her gaze is fixed on Nymphadora’s arm. Her left forearm, bare for lack of jacket and her short sleeves.

Nymphadora brings her arm back down and traces her mark with her other hand. “Yeah, it’s pretty cool, right? Been tryin’ to figure out what the flowers are, but no dice.”

“ _ Les campanules _ ,” Fleur whispers. “Bellflowers, Bill said.”

Fleur steps closer. She pushes aside the jacket and her shawl and pulls up her sleeve. She grabs a handful of snow from the ground and starts furiously scrubbing at the skin of her forearm until it’s bright red. Earlier, her soulmark showed a star and a compass needle. But now, there, sitting on her skin, is the outline of a sword sheath, with those same purple blooms curled around it.

“Bellflowers,” Nymphadora repeats. 

Dainty fingers trace over Nymphadora’s soulmark, over the lines of the sword and the purple of the flowers.

“‘e asked me to ‘elp get ‘is mother off of ‘is back. I didn’t think…” Fleur notes absently.

“I thought you were really hot in the Triwizard Tournament,” Nymphadora blurts. “I only agreed to come tonight because Charlie said you would be here.”

“I am part Veela,” she explains.

“Yeah, so am I and most Purebloods in the country, but they aren’t half as pretty as you. Or as dangerous. I’ve never seen someone take down a dragon like that before. Not a single hair out of place, it was really impressive. Charlie is one of the best big beast tamers I know and even he needs three assistants and a specialized stunner to do what you did with some glitter and a sleeping charm.”

At that, Fleur flushes. “Beast tamers? as you say? I wanted to be one, but Beauxbatons does not ‘ave the classes.”

“I bet Charlie could get you hooked up. He’s a professional, and he was working at the Tourney. The Tournament. He also nearly creamed himself when you took down your dragon like that. Speaking of!” Nymphadora turns and pokes her head back inside the house. “Charlie! Bill! Guess fuckin’ what!”

Looking back at Fleur, she extends her hand. “Let’s go give Mrs. Weasley a heart attack, yeah?”

Faintly, she hears Charlie groan inside. “Nymphadora Artcura Tonks, I swear, if you’re out there sucking face with Bill’s girlfriend--”

“Even better!” she crows, and pulls Fleur back inside behind her.

**Author's Note:**

> listen. listen. the fact that nymphadora arctura tonks (middle name of my own invention) wasnt a stone cold butch lesbian was some bullshit and im here to remedy it. i cant emphasize how much butch energy i wanted her to give off. short hair? check. best friends with a guy? check. worn leather jacket stolen from dad? check. offering that jacket to a cold femme? check. jkr is a coward and doesnt have an imagination.
> 
> also!!! best part about jkr not writing anything about regulus means that i can go HOGWILD.
> 
> yall are also not getting day 13 because, again, its midterms and im drained as fuck
> 
> check me out on tumblr @fullmetalruby


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